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The iPhone is the most popular email client, according to an analysis of millions of email marketing messages sent by Contactology users.

We examined the devices, mobile and desktop email clients used in more than 125 million opens from October through December of 2012.

The iPhone accounted for more than 19 percent of all opens. Various versions of Outlook and Apple Mail were tied for the second most popular email client, each with 11 percent of overall opens.

"Desktop" email clients including dedicated email software applications and webmail providers are still used more frequently (56 percent) than mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets (44 percent). But mobile appears to be gaining — mobile opens increased in both November and December.

Contactology records information about the client that's used to open an email marketing message. Statistics for individual email campaigns are always available to Contactology users in the Email Client Report.

The data used to calculate the most popular email clients represents all opens and clicks across Contactology direct and white label clients.

Opens are recorded when the images in an HTML message load or when a recipient clicks a link in the message. It’s not always possible to record which client is used to open the message. Certain email clients, such as Gmail, do not load images by default, which could skew the results.

Outlook and Apple Mail accounted for more than half of all desktop opens. Among non-mobile devices, Gmail (18 percent) and Yahoo! Mail (15 percent) were the most popular web mail clients.

Among mobile devices, Apple’s iPhone and iPad rule the landscape — together they accounted for 81 percent of all opens. Android devices accounted for 17 percent of mobile devices and 7 percent of all opens.